TSMC and ARM announce further collaboration

Chip manufacturer TSMC and chip designer ARM have announced a new partnership. The partnership aims to align TSMC’s future manufacturing technology and ARM’s 64-bit chips as closely as possible.

The collaboration offers future benefits for customers who purchase designs from ARM, such as Qualcomm and Texas Instruments, as well as Samsung, and then have their chips manufactured at TSMC. ARM is developing 64bit chips under the v8 architecture. The chips can be used in servers, among other things, and should be available in 2014. TSMC is moving from traditional transistors to finfets, also known as 3D transistors. The new breed of transistors offers a number of advantages, but also presents challenges for chip designers.

TSMC plans to introduce finfets along with the 16nm process, which will see the light of day sometime in 2014. Intel has already switched to finfets with its 22nm process. TSMC and ARM are already working together, as TSMC will first introduce another 20nm process before making the switch to 16nm and later even 14nm. For the time being, customers of TSMC have to do it with a 28nm process.